I was feeling sick and going over my past reddit posts just to kill time until it’s time to sleep (to not mess up my sleep schedule), and found this post from a year ago that I think still makes sense.

=============

After 15 episodes in, Designated Survivor is feeling like a comical satire of the Trump administration. In some parts, there are parallel connections, and in some others, if we were to get inside Trump supporters’ minds, this is how they would imagine themselves – fighting the good fight to protect an embattled, post-apocalyptic America. In the 2000 movie The Cell, detectives enter a psychopath’s mind, materialized into a virtual-reality-of-sorts through a machine, where there are horrific depictions of their depraved thoughts, but in some scenes also some of them are represented beautifully because that’s how the psychopath feels about it internally. Now apply that mechanism to Trump and their supporters.

Your ignorance of history and the importance of the electoral college is appalling. Without the electoral college, the president would only care about satisfying the will of the people in about 15 states. The rest of the states would be totally forgotten.

1. There are more poor people in California than in Iowa.2. I haven’t looked it up, but I would wager that California has more, and if not at least comparable, numbers of farmers as Iowa farmers.3. Iowa also has its share of major cities and a (three?) metropolis, where people live in relative comfort and in this so-called “coastal elite life” – although granted, such cities are fewer in number, and comparatively smaller, than in California.4. The electoral college equally screws up a bunch of these “small” states as it does other “large” states, while giving an edge to relatively large purple states (large, relatively speaking, when considering the totality of purple states) like Iowa or Pennsylvania.5. There is one sure thing Iowa has more of than California: the percentage of white people. This, despite the increasing influx of people of color and immigrants into the state.

Of course, I must confess that I have maliciously concealed one crucial factor in this comparison – California gets way more sunlight than Iowa. Now THIS is a vote manipulation I can get behind, if we insist on this whole “helping out those in need by making their votes count more or less” thing. Make votes count proportionally inverse to the median temperature, at the county level. The colder the region, the more your vote counts. This way, everyone wins – even San Francisco would have the satisfaction of having beat their rival Los Angeles. Los Angeles can sacrifice for the greater good.

Image: File:ElectoralCollege2016.svg, CC BY-SA

Image: File:ElectoralCollege2008.svg, CC BY-SA

Full Disclaimer: This post was typed while staying in Chicago in a 0 Degrees Fahrenheit January. My fingers are freezing and I can’t breathe. (0 F is -17 Degrees Celsius for you normies)

this is the first time i hear of Prager U but it seems they make among the most easily rebutted right wing arguments on the internet – after youtube comments. not sure if they are a menace for giving the right wing something to link, or a blessing for giving too many people the worst argumentative tools.